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Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering

https://mistral.ai/news/leanstral
520•Poudlardo•12h ago•104 comments

The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer

https://blog.voxagon.se/2026/03/13/teardown-multiplayer.html
61•lairv•3d ago•7 comments

Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc

https://engineering.fb.com/2026/03/02/data-infrastructure/investing-in-infrastructure-metas-renew...
432•hahahacorn•15h ago•188 comments

The “small web” is bigger than you might think

https://kevinboone.me/small_web_is_big.html
418•speckx•15h ago•176 comments

The American Healthcare Conundrum

https://github.com/rexrodeo/american-healthcare-conundrum
337•rexroad•16h ago•293 comments

Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316
215•greyface-•5h ago•108 comments

Gitana 18: the new flying Ultim trimaran

https://www.boatnews.com/story/50717/gitana-18-radical-technical-choices-for-the-new-flying-ultim...
31•divbzero•4d ago•3 comments

US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-sec-preparing-eliminate-quarterly-reporting-requireme...
569•djoldman•9h ago•308 comments

Sci-Fi Short Film “There Is No Antimemetics Division” [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v8AsTHfAG0
81•Anon84•3d ago•17 comments

Pyodide: a Python distribution based on WebAssembly

https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide
69•tosh•3d ago•23 comments

Monkey Island for Commodore 64 Ground Up

https://pixeldust.se/monkey-island-project
121•aresant•5h ago•37 comments

My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/my-journey-to-a-reliable-and-enjoyable-locally-hosted-voice...
370•Vaslo•20h ago•105 comments

Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

https://plantbasednews.org/news/alternative-protein/beyond-meat-not-the-moment-rebrand/
124•rmason•12h ago•241 comments

Why I love FreeBSD

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2026/03/16/why-i-love-freebsd/
428•enz•21h ago•206 comments

Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language

https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=LinkedIn+speak
449•smitec•4h ago•108 comments

Claude Tips for 3D Work

https://www.davesnider.com/posts/claude-3d
75•snide•3d ago•18 comments

Show HN: Oxyde – Pydantic-native async ORM with a Rust core

https://github.com/mr-fatalyst/oxyde
104•mr_Fatalyst•3d ago•59 comments

Starlink Mini as a failover

https://www.jackpearce.co.uk/posts/starlink-failover/
256•jkpe•1d ago•186 comments

Fatal Core Dump Game

https://www.robopenguins.com/core-dump-game/
3•pabs3•4d ago•0 comments

In space, no one can hear you kernel panic (2020)

https://increment.com/software-architecture/in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-kernel-panic/
59•p0u4a•4d ago•9 comments

Show HN: Thermal Receipt Printers – Markdown and Web UI

https://github.com/sadreck/ThermalMarky
80•howlett•3d ago•30 comments

AirPods Max 2

https://www.apple.com/airpods-max/
279•ssijak•19h ago•459 comments

Show HN: Droeftoeter, a Terminal Coding Toy

https://github.com/whtspc/droeftoeter
9•whtspc64•4d ago•3 comments

Jepsen: MariaDB Galera Cluster 12.1.2

https://jepsen.io/analyses/mariadb-galera-cluster-12.1.2
72•aphyr•5h ago•6 comments

Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if...
1480•defly•21h ago•935 comments

Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs

https://www.moment.dev/blog/lies-i-was-told-pt-2
245•antics•4d ago•113 comments

The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/the-bureaucracy-blocking-the-chance
130•item•1d ago•151 comments

AnswerThis (YC F25) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/answerthis/jobs/CNdatw5-founding-engineering-lead
1•ayush4921•12h ago

Speed at the cost of quality: Study of use of Cursor AI in open source projects (2025)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04427
110•wek•16h ago•61 comments

Language model teams as distributed systems

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12229
91•jryio•15h ago•39 comments
Open in hackernews

The Beam

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/the-beam-erlangs-virtual-machine/
105•Alupis•10mo ago

Comments

schultzer•10mo ago
One thing that is great about Erlang’s pattern matching is that it makes it extremely approachable for writing, lexer, parser and compilers in it: https://github.com/elixir-dbvisor/sql and with Elixir macros and sigils then you can embed other languages like sql and zig to name a few!
wk_end•10mo ago
Does Erlang/Elixer have any edge over Ocaml or Haskell in that niche? They also have pattern matching, of course, and strong static types tend to work nicely for compilers too.

Of course, the big superpower they have is the BEAM and the robust multiprocessing support there, but that’s not especially helpful for compilers…or is it?

schultzer•10mo ago
Elixir compiler is written in Erlang, Erlang can produce very efficient code, the new json library can beat c libraries at decoding / encoding. And you get this with a strongly typed dynamic language, which is a distributed language. It’s really hard to beat the BEAM, if only we had better number crunching, but in so cases you can always write a nif.
dcsommer•10mo ago
"Strongly typed" is stretching it. Type checking is bolted on and not part of `erlc`. Typing is quite unergonomic in Erlang/Elixir (similar to Typescript bolted onto JS).

The type system is one of the weakest parts of the beam ecosystem.

troupo•10mo ago
Elixir team is slowly bringing in type checking into the language: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/10/05/my-future-with-elixi... and https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/gradual-set-theoretic-types.html
Munksgaard•10mo ago
Erlang/Elixir are certainly strongly typed[0] but they are not statically typed[1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Static_type_checki...

lolinder•10mo ago
You can't really use the word "certainly" when speaking about "strongly typed" because the entire concept is fuzzy and subjective. From the article you linked:

> > However, there is no precise technical definition of what the terms mean and different authors disagree about the implied meaning of the terms and the relative rankings of the "strength" of the type systems of mainstream programming languages. For this reason, writers who wish to write unambiguously about type systems often eschew the terms "strong typing" and "weak typing" in favor of specific expressions such as "type safety".

I personally think the whole concept of "strongly typed", which is usually used as a prop to make dynamic languages count as part of the cool kids typed-languages club, should be ditched as a point of argument. The supposed "weakly typed" languages people are usually comparing to (like C) aren't actually framed as viable alternative for problems dynamic languages are suited for, so they're something of a straw man. I'd like to see advocates for dynamically typed languages ditch the obsession with having types like the cool kids and instead focus on showing why dynamism is valuable.

There are plenty of great cases to make for dynamism without having to argue on rhetorical ground that the static languages defined and dominate.

Munksgaard•10mo ago
I agree that the terminology is not ideal, but think there's a huge difference between JS' "weak types", i.e. abundant implicit conversions, and e.g. Elixirs "strong types", where `1 + "foo"` is a runtime error. I don't care if we call the latter something else though. Any good suggestions?

That said, I prefer having both strong and static typing, but that's another argument.

zbentley•10mo ago
I'd suggest "high-cast" and "low-cast". They draw attention to the thing that people usually mean when they talk about strong (not static) typing: whether operations in a language bias towards automatically coercing types so that a non-type-error result can be produced or not. High-cast languages tend towards requiring explicit type conversion; low-cast languages tend towards both implicit conversion and more complex behaviors when more than one type is supplied to a given operation. Also, the terms pun nicely with "high-cost" and "low-cost".

That said, it's still a spectrum and there's a lot of subjectiveness here. Everyone agrees that '1 + "foo"' is meaningless, but what about string multiplication? If a language documents that an integer multiplied by a string repeats the string, is that weakly typed/low-cast, or is it just documented multiplication operator behavior? If string multiplication is a whole separate operator, is that more strongly typed (and if so, are we all gonna be able to sleep at night since that means Perl 5 is more strongly typed than Python)?

That subjectiveness extends into the domain of hidden runtime costs, as well. Theoretically, any iterable of hashable items can be passed to a language's implementation of "HashSet::union(items)". But the implementation/performance of "union()" might differ based on the type of the iterable: should we be allowed to pass a lazy iterator which produces values after arbitrary custom computations? Many languages say "yes" here, but some consider collecting/each-ing the iterator something that must be explicit so the cost/exhaustion/side-effectfulness of the iteration is made clear. How about unioning a set with a vector, versus another set? Very different algorithmic behavior happens inside the union if another hash set is supplied instead of, say, a static array or linked list; while the complexity for nonlazy unions is always O(N), the average complexity/wallclock performance may be very different. Rust's stdlib, for example, discourages this kind of heterogenous union (not, I suspect, out of a desire for high-cast-explicitness, but because it wants to encourage use of its lazy O(1) union system instead). Are the answers to that question part of the high-cast/low-cast (or strong/weak type system) spectrum, or are they just specific choices made by each language's collections library? Ask 10 programmers, and I suspect you'll get a lot of different answers.

cess11•10mo ago
Dialyzer might be considered "bolted on", but the BEAM itself is strongly and dynamically typed. In Elixir the compiler is getting static typing as well.

https://learnyousomeerlang.com/types-or-lack-thereof

These languages have other properties that can play the role that types are sometimes relied upon to do. It's uncommon that I think in types at all when building things in Elixir, thinking about shapes usually gets me all the way.

In my experience string processing libraries are the weakest part, due to some of them having abysmal performance for whatever reason. Last I had this problem I wanted to do ETL on mbox files but gave up and did it with someone's PHP one-class weekend project instead.

cess11•10mo ago
You probably don't, Numerical Elixir/Nx has been out for years and did the NIF:ing for you.

It's one part of why it's quite convenient to juggle ML and LLM tasks on the BEAM, and easy enough that I can manage it.

https://github.com/elixir-nx

Munksgaard•10mo ago
As someone who has used both SML, Haskell, Rust and Elixir professionally: No, not really.

Access to the BEAM is nice, but unless you're targeting the BEAM in your compiler I don't see any benefit. Even if you're targeting the BEAM, you might decide to use another language, cf. Gleam: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/

Edit: Actually, one thing I will mention is the superior support in Elixir/Erlang for pattern matching bitstrings[0]. Not usually helpful in compilers, but an evolution of pattern matching that other languages should take up, in my opinion.

0: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.SpecialForms.html#%3C%3C%3E...

tikhonj•10mo ago
OCaml also has a binary string pattern matching feature which sounds pretty similar: https://practicalocaml.com/parsing-with-binary-string-patter...
Rendello•10mo ago
Erlang's bitstring/binary handling is one of those things that once you use, you'll wonder why it's not in every language (alongside, for me, Rust's enum/sum types and Python's badly-named but wonderfully useful while-else).
xelxebar•10mo ago
Studying the BEAM is definitely on my ToDo list. It's task parallelism sounds exemplar, and I really want to understand the architectural ramifications of choosing fine-grained task parallelism vs. a data parallel-friendly approach.
troupo•10mo ago
I wish articles like this had more meat on why BEAM is good.

You have to say why it's good. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28015852

brandonpollack2•10mo ago
If only there was a typed language that didn't hand wave serialization
mrkeen•10mo ago
I don't think we'll ever do better than 'IO is made out of bytes'.
kimi•10mo ago
Like Java?
monkfish328•10mo ago
Love beam

I just wish elixir had static typing built in :)

arrowsmith•10mo ago
Give Elixir a try anyway, you might be surprised:

https://arrowsmithlabs.com/blog/you-might-not-need-gradual-t...

Taikonerd•10mo ago
Then you'll love Gleam -- it's a BEAM language with static typing!

https://gleam.run/

idahoduncan•10mo ago
The Strand programming book states that an early version of the Erlang runtime was implemented in Strand (see "13.1: History" http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/files/strand-b...), which is an interesting tidbit that I haven't seen come up when the history of Erlang is discussed, like in the featured article.
kristel100•10mo ago
It’s fascinating how long the BEAM has lasted. And even more fascinating how relevant its concurrency model still is in today’s async-heavy world. Built different.